An Alternative to the Hunger Model

Alliance for Food Sovereignty As A Tool To Unite Peoples

On Tuesday 6, August, the participants of the Assembly of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty, which is taking place in Bogota, Colombia, recognized the process as an instrument to unite people against the global food production and distribution model, which has condemned a billion people in the world to hunger.

The meeting of the Alliance recognizes that they have not started from scratch, but there is almost two decades of work of social organizations behind it.

“The Alliance aims to be an instrument to get peoples together around the struggle for food sovereignty as a key element in building a new model of society based on Good Living and Peoples’ Sovereignty” reads the declaration. For this reason, they resist the ruling development model that “privatizes food systems, culture, knowledge”.

Food sovereignty becomes a “principle, a vision and a legacy built by indigenous peoples, peasants, fisherfolk, women, African descendants, Young people, rural workers, etc. that summarizes our struggles in a proposal for the society as a whole”.

For that purpose, they claim the need to defend the territories understood as lands, mangroves, wetlands, water and forests, to strengthen the struggle against land grabbing and large-scale exploitation; extractivism and the privatization of common goods; large-scale industrial agricultural promoted by the capitalist system that commodifies life.

“We defend our biodiversity by using traditional agricultural based on agroecology, which is a solution to the problems of our planet”, reads the declaration signed on Tuesday 6th by the representatives of the Assembly.

Food sovereignty based on agroecology can solve many environmental problems, such as desertification, climate change and the loss of biodiversity. It is an answer to the world’s hunger as well as to the increasing food prices.

The Alliance believes that protecting biodiversity includes protecting seeds and traditional knowledge that is patent-free and is against genetically modified organisms that undermine and destroy the land and water ecosystems .

The Alliance reclaims agroecology understood as “a way of life that recovers everything we have lost, a connection with ancient knowledge. It is a force that confronts capitalism, it defends local markets as a key part of preserving values and the knowledge of the communities, it questions food prices and promotes exchange as a different social economic model”.

Finally, the participants of the assembly said that “we are taking a very important step to achieve the deep changes that our continent needs to combat the ruling development model based on extractivism that leads to displacement and extermination”.

At the end of the assembly, there will be a Regional Consultation of civil society organizations about the Global Strategic Framework of the Committee of Global Food Security and the decisions made on “responsible agriculture investment” on August 7 and 8.